We all know the experience of going through a cheesy haunted house around Halloween. You know there’s someone around the corner waiting to jump out and scream at in your face. You know that mannequin in the corner is actually a person who’s going to lunge in your direction. Everything is built to give you a cheap jump scare, so you’re always scanning every corner to make sure you’re prepared. Survival horror video games are often built the same way as a haunted house. Level designers place triggers throughout the game world so that players will active certain events when passing them.
One game that took this haunted house analogy literally was the 2001 Dreamcast game Illbleed. The game casts you as Eriko, a member of a “horror research” club who gets invited, along with her friends, to Illbleed, a haunted house that offers a million-dollar prize to anyone who makes it all the way through. Eriko skips out on it, but her friends gladly accept the offer. Of course, they go missing, so she has to head to Illbleed to try to rescue them.
The actual areas you go through embrace the b-movie nature of a corny haunted house to double down on the feel of the real-life experience. Lots of horror games embrace a more campy tone, but this one seems to do so with a gusto that sets it apart. Stages have names like “Killer Department Store” and “Revenge of the Queen Worm,” giving it the feel of a late-night SyFy channel movie marathon. The dialog has that weird disaffected tone to it, further adding a layer of delightful cheese.
What makes this game really interesting is the way it directly translates the feeling of going through a haunted house into gameplay mechanics. Rather than being a traditional survival horror about counting your bullets and avoiding combat, the game instead focuses on you carefully examining your environment while you manage several different status meters that you need to keep you alive.
Immediately when you look at the screen, you see a user interface that’s dense with information. Across the bottom are meters showing your stamina, adrenaline, bleeding, and pulse. Along the top of the screen are EKG-like graphics for four senses – sight, hearing, smell and “sixth sense.” It can be pretty overwhelming to figure out at first, especially since there is no tutorial to clarify, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a unique system that has a lot of smart balancing elements.
Illbleed’s influence on Until Dawn
The majority of gameplay centers around two things: shock events and your horror monitor. As you explore the various areas, you’ll see signals appear on your various senses telling you there’s something nearby. When one of your senses is going wild, you can switch from the default third-person view to a first-person camera to use your horror monitor. This highlights spots around you and lets you “mark” them as something to investigate. These marked spots can either end up being items, which can be used to manage your various stats, or shock events, jump scares hidden around the map. These shock events range from light bulbs popping to windows bleeding to corpses moving on their own. They are really corny, but perfectly match the tone of the rest of the game.
Marking things with your horror monitor costs adrenaline, one of your main resources that needs to be managed. You can recover adrenaline either by correctly identifying shock events or using items. This gives you an interesting risk-reward situation with the horror monitor: you could try to mark everything the horror monitor sees, but only a certain amount of those will be shock events allowing you to recover adrenaline. This forces you to try to find patterns in your senses and figure out what might indicate a shock event versus what indicates an item.
The consequences for not marking a shock event is that it scares your character, raising your heart rate. If your heart rate gets too high, it’s game over. There are monster encounters scattered throughout the levels, and these can damage both your stamina and bleeding stats. All of these stats can lead to your untimely death, but they can be regulated by various items. Upon revisiting this game, I was surprised to realize how much this game shared DNA with modern survival games. So much of it is about making careful choices to gather and smartly use resources to manage your various meters.
All of these mechanics combine into something that carefully mimics the real-life feeling of walking through a haunted house. You carefully make your way through the environment, trying to spot every possible thing that might startle you. The pace is slow, and there’s a lot more trial and error than you’re used to in a survival horror game, but there’s something really engaging about these clunky mechanics. It’s such a wholly consistent vision that commits to its theme 100 percent, making it a memorable experience.